PART TWO

I understand now that I went to Canberra because the breakup of my marriage had left me humiliated and angry. I wanted to look at women who were accused of murder. I wanted to gaze at them and hear their voices, to see the shape of their bodies and how they moved and gestured, to watch the expressions on their faces. I needed to find out if anything made them different from me: whether I could trust myself to keep the lid on the vengeful, punitive force that was in me, as it is in everyone – the wildness that one keeps in its cage, releasing it only in dreams and fantasy.

That day, though, as I went straight home, called the airline and packed a bag, I was still thinking of myself as a writer at a loose end who had stumbled on something interesting. I thought I would be able to slip quietly into the court with my notebook for a shield. I could watch and listen for a while, satisfy my curiosity, and wander out again at will, unscathed and free of obligation. But I was about to learn a hard lesson. A story lies in wait for a writer. It flashes out silent signals.

Without knowing she is doing it, the writer receives the message, drops everything, and turns to follow.

When I got to the ACT Supreme Court on 6 April 1999, Anu Singh’s defence was already in progress. It took me a moment to get my bearings. The courtroom was so palely timbered and greenly curtained, so shallow and wide and muffled by carpet, that it could have been a suburban lounge room.

Two women were stationed side by side on padded chrome chairs, out in the middle of the space. One was a tall, blonde, scraggly-haired security guard. The other was Anu Singh. Her hair, dark and reddish-tinted and very long, was pulled back and firmly bound into a thick club that bulged on the nape of her neck. She was wearing street clothes: a long skirt and a dark-blue jacket laced criss-cross in the small of her back. Her bare feet were slipped into high wedge-heeled sandals. She sat very still, very erect, with her right leg crossed over her left. Beside her slouching escort she looked dainty, almost prim. A sliver of profile was all I could see of her face.

The witness on the stand could only be her father. Heavy-shouldered, with a close-clipped beard, Dr Singh leaned back in the chair with his hands folded on his belly. He was a man of substance, unfazed by the formality of his surroundings; but the version of his daughter’s life that the barrister was drawing from him, as I slid into the back row of the gallery, was a sorry one.

Anu, he was saying, had been barely a year old when the family migrated from the Punjab and settled in Newcastle. She was a clever little girl, but very clingy. She slept in her parents’ bedroom till she was four or five. Puberty hit early – by thirteen she was ‘fully developed’.

As a teenager she became a real headache, slacking off on schoolwork, wearing revealing clothes, refusing to help her mother, always sneaking out to see boys. Then, from year eleven, the dieting started. Somehow she stayed near the top of her class, and in year ten she was dux. Her HSC score was high, but not first rank. In 1991 she went to Canberra to study economics and law at the Australian National University.

She coped poorly away from home, he thought – always on the phone to her mother – until in late 1993 she took up with a fellow student, Simon Walsh. Dr Singh was annoyed with her for becoming a vegetarian and overdoing the aerobics classes, but for a while she seemed to become more stable.

In 1995, the doctor went on, the Singh family left Newcastle and moved to a middle-class suburb of Sydney. That year Anu came home from uni at the September break in an odd state. She wouldn’t go out or dress up, but sat about in casual clothes, crying for no apparent reason. Whenever her father saw her she was coming out of the shower. She paced the floor all night.

Any woman who has left home for university could fill in the gaps here, I thought. Drugs. Booze. Stupid, risky sex. ‘Love’ affairs. Casual wounding. Pregnancy. Abortion. What do parents know? What can a girl afford to tell them about her stampede towards danger and self-damage?

Another set of parents sat in the middle of the front row of the public gallery. They looked like Italians. They sat shoulder to shoulder, quiet and still, rarely speaking or turning to each other, but it was obvious who they were. Around their attentive heads glowed an aura of anguish.

That summer of ’95–’96, Dr Singh told the court, his daughter became frighteningly thin – no more than forty kilos. She ate nothing but Coke and TimTams. He could see her bones. She would pull up her shirt (here his voice choked, he wept, he wiped his eyes; his daughter, listening on her chair, did the same) and show him hanging skin. ‘Look,’ she would say, pinching it. ‘It’s fat.’

Dr Singh told her she had an eating disorder and must see a psychologist. She flatly refused, and begged and pestered till he made an appointment for her to have liposuction. Such was the power of his daughter’s will that he even paid a deposit of several hundred dollars to the cosmetic surgeon. At the eleventh hour she cancelled.

In September 1996 she brought home a new boyfriend, a young man from Newcastle called Joe Cinque. His daughter was happy, said Dr Singh. He could see it in her face. But that summer her litany of complaints began again: aching legs, hot flushes and pains, things crawling on her skin. She became withdrawn and tearful. She refused to see a psychiatrist.

By May 1997 she was convinced that her muscles were gone. Life wasn’t worth living, she said. In August, she started to sell her clothes and give away her CDs. When she went back to university, her parents twice rang the Mental Health Crisis Team in Canberra; but each time they came to Anu’s house, she sent them away.

‘On 26 October 1997,’ said the barrister, ‘you saw your daughter?’

‘In the Canberra lock-up,’ said Dr Singh. ‘She was agitated, crying, pinching and pulling at her arms. She asked me “Where am I?” We could only stay ten minutes, because of her state of mind.’

Cross-examined by the Crown, Dr Singh said his daughter missed Joe now, that she was deeply saddened he was no longer with her – I glanced at the couple in the front row, and saw Mrs Cinque’s shoulders stiffen – but she had never told her father she regretted killing Joe, for Dr Singh had never asked her anything about how Joe had died.

‘She has never told you she injected him with heroin?’

‘I didn’t raise that question,’ said Dr Singh. ‘She’s too disturbed. It’s a very sad thing. I don’t want to bring it up. I only tell her all the time, “What you did, you were sick. You were sick.” We have general chitchat. I want to relax her. I talk about family. I talk about religion. I talk about peace of mind.’

‘What religion are you?’ asked the prosecutor.

‘I believe in humanity.’

‘And her beliefs about humanity?’

‘She is too young,’ said her father, ‘to have any beliefs.’

What I needed was a journalist. At the break I looked around the lobby for one of those shockingly young reporters who are sent to cover Supreme Court trials. The squalor and misery they are exposed to every day can make them seem thick-skinned, even coarse: I like them. They are always good company, full of ‘facts’ and keen to gossip and speculate. I spotted two of them, smartly-dressed and friendly-looking women in their twenties, hanging about near the glassed-in atrium with its struggling plants. I sidled up and introduced myself. They were a classic pair: one a thin, quiet, thoughtful blonde, the other dark, irreverent and bouncily talkative. Yes, they’d been there for everything I’d missed – the whole Crown case against Anu Singh. What the hell, I asked them, was this story about a dinner party? And where was the jury?

With gusto and a fair amount of eye-rolling, they filled me in. There had been more than one dinner party at the couple’s townhouse, in the week before the murder. Singh would send out her friend Madhavi Rao at the last minute to round up a random crew of guests from neighbouring student households. Some who’d been called to give evidence had heard gossip about a suicide plan, others had been told about a possible murder, but with a single notable exception they all claimed not to have taken it seriously. One girl, though, told the court she had actually dropped in to Rao’s house the morning after one of the dinners and asked, ‘Did anything happen? Did anyone die?’

Anyway, Anu Singh had been in Belconnen Remand Centre for eighteen months. She now admitted having given Joe Cinque the lethal dose, but she was going for diminished responsibility. For this defence to work, the journalists said, you had to prove that at the time you did the crime you were suffering from ‘an abnormality of mind’. And this meant a lot of psychiatric evidence. Singh’s counsel – the sharp-voiced little guy with dark red cheeks – was Jack Pappas. The Crown Prosecutor, taller and rangier and less aggro in style, was Terry Golding.

As for the jury – there wasn’t one. Singh had chosen to be tried by judge alone. The journalists laughed at the look on my face. Yes, you could do that in the ACT. He was Justice Ken Crispin, the same judge who had presided over the earlier jury trial that had been aborted. He was a Christian, they said, ‘a lay preacher’ in the Uniting Church. As a barrister he had acted for Lindy Chamberlain. He wrote a book about her case. He had also appeared for the victims in the Chelmsford Deep Sleep Therapy trial. He was well thought of in Canberra. People liked him.

And the other girl? The ‘doormat’ friend?

Madhavi Rao, said the journalists, was out on $100,000 bail, on condition that she live at home in Sydney with her parents: her father, a high school teacher, had put up the family house as surety. She would have her own separate trial, later in the year.

The young journalists spoke of Anu Singh with a complete lack of sympathy, indeed with a rough contempt. ‘And you should have seen some of her friends who gave evidence,’ said the dark one, with a short, scornful laugh. ‘Talk about flaky!’ She stretched her neck, lowered her eyelids, and moved her head about in a parody of swan-like hauteur.

‘What sort of clothes?’ I asked, dismayed at how much I had missed.

‘Oh – Country Road,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Daddy will pay. Daddy will pay.’

In her cynicism I heard an echo of the primitive female hostility that had made the back of my neck prickle at the sight of Anu Singh’s photo in the Canberra Times. It occurred to me that if I had been Singh’s defence counsel, I too would have seized any opportunity to get rid of the jury, particularly if it had contained women.

When the court rose that day I carried my backpack along Northbourne Avenue and took a room in the first hotel I could stand the sight of. It was a warm afternoon. I lay on the bed for a while thinking about Anu Singh and her distracted visits home from university. I wondered if my parents had guessed what was the matter with me, in 1964, when I took the train home to Geelong after I had had an abortion. I thought about money. I tried to figure out a way to follow this trial without having to commit myself to a publisher. Then I walked back to Civic and bought myself two new notebooks and a bunch of pens.

Next morning in the courtroom, just before the judge made his entrance between the grey-green velvet curtains, I heard someone at the bar table humming. It was only a worker absentmindedly settling down to a long day’s slog, but how awful it seemed, this light, tuneful sound.

A video of Anu Singh’s charging was to be shown.

The monitor on the bar table sprang to life.

On the bright rectangle a figure dressed from neck to ankle in glaring synthetic white is jerking to and fro in front of a high bench or counter, behind which a man in uniform stands. Her hair is clumped on top of her head in a knob, and her arms are swaddled against her torso as if by a straitjacket – no, it’s only the peculiar white jumpsuit she’s wearing, and her doll-like stance. Voices urge her to stand still, but she can’t, she won’t.

Do you wanna do me a favour, says a man’s voice, and stand back on the yellow line? Just step back on to the line, just so the camera can film you properly.

Yep, says the white figure. But she keeps sighing, raising her hands to her hair, turning and pacing and moving about.

You are charged, the voice announces, that in the Australian Capital Territory on the 26th of October 1997 you did murder Joe – he stumbles over the name, and bungles it – Joe Ching-koo. Do you understand that?

In the public gallery Mrs Cinque put one hand over her eyes, then, holding her head high, folded and refolded her hanky.

The tiny white-clad puppet on the screen rocks and jerks. Her answers to the laborious utterances of the police sergeant are more like sighs and murmurs than speech: she can’t seem to get her breath. The voice cautions her formally, asks her if she understands, cautions her again. It charges her with murder, then with administering to another person, namely Joe Ching-koo, a stupefying drug namely heroin, likely to endanger a human life.

Just stand back a little bit, the voice keeps telling her. Just stand on the yellow line.

Has anyone called? gasps the figure in white. Ah – ah – ah – did you speak to my parents?

They’re coming down to Canberra.

Are they? Energy surges into her voice.

They know where you are.

What’d you tell them?

That you’re on a murder charge, that Joe had died . . .

Okay, says the figure in white, rocking, pacing, shifting in and out of shot. Okay – when do I leave here?

‘Never!’ shouted Joe Cinque’s mother from her seat in the gallery. She too rocked and rocked, folding her arms across her belly. Her husband sat hunched and motionless beside her.

The video, with its fixed camera, garish colours and muffled dialogue, was packed with more meaning than the most professional production. It was raw with pain. The Cinques and Dr Singh were sitting as far away from each other as they could get in a gallery that had only four rows of seats, but their faces in profile wore the same expression: heavy, the mouths low, the skin and flesh sagging off the bone.

The video machine had developed a glitch, and the court adjourned briefly while it was repaired. Anu Singh left with her escort. She passed her father at the end of his row. They did not look at each other. Everyone else filed out into the carpeted hall. People vanished into the toilets, or drank water at the cooler from tiny waxed-paper cups. A group of whispering law students went into a huddle round their tutor. Sun came flooding through the glass walls of the atrium.

Outside the building it was a late summer morning, grass-scented, brilliant. Joe Cinque’s father walked to the very edge of the lawn. He was a solitary figure under the high, pure Canberra sky. He dragged fiercely on a cigarette, clenching his jaw and staring across the dark green grass at the traffic.

The first expert witness called by Anu Singh’s defence was Dr Kenneth Byrne, a clinical and forensic psychologist who practised in Melbourne. He was a New Yorker in his forties with pale hair and eyelashes, tasselled loafers, and a neatly packed little overnight bag that rested against the leg of his chair.

It was immediately plain that Dr Byrne was in his element: he spoke with the relaxed and smiling assurance of a pro. His thing today was measurement, and in particular something called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. He declared the MMPI the most widely researched psychological test in the world. It was designed to measure pathology. A computer could score it. The person being tested was presented with 556 propositions, to which the possible responses were agree/don’t agree. It was sensitive enough to pick up faking – a subject’s attempt to make herself look healthier, or sicker, than she really was.

Byrne rode the buffetings of Golding’s cross-examination in a breezy, high-handed style. Something about him got up my nose. Was it his debonair and stagy demeanour, his habit of addressing the judge man-to-man, his didactic listing and numbering of points as if to a roomful of freshers? Or was it the famous MMPI itself, with its bombastic title and claims to omniscience? In my irritation I was tempted to think of the MMPI as an enjoyably wanky life-style quiz of the sort one fills out to kill time in a doctor’s waiting room. Maliciously I even permitted myself to imagine Anu Singh whiling away several idle hours, smoking cigarettes and doodling in the margins and ticking the little boxes, in her cell.

The Anu Singh that Dr Byrne described to the court, however, was a disturbed and suicidal young woman, lost in a deluded belief that she would soon die from a degenerative disease. She suffered, he said, from a severe borderline personality disorder, which he dated to her mid-adolescence, and a severe depression, which she had had well before she came into custody. He worked his way down a list of the features that signalled the existence of a borderline personality disorder: of a possible nine, Anu Singh exhibited the high score of six.

In the lobby at lunchtime I stood about with the two journalists. They giggled and glanced this way and that, comparing notes in whispers on how many of Dr Byrne’s categories and symptoms seemed to apply to them. A problem in establishing a solid sense of Who am I? Definitely. Mood swings? Absolutely. Significant impulsivity? Of course. Fear of abandonment? Totally. Easily angered? I mean, hellooow?

Our laughter was slightly shrill. No one said it but we were all thinking, Call that mental illness? She’s exactly like me.

As the break was ending, I came out of a toilet cubicle and saw Joe Cinque’s mother standing with her back to me, combing her hair at the mirror. She moved aside to let me at the basin. We glanced at each other’s reflections and smiled. She was a solid, broad-faced woman of fifty or so, rather handsome, with straight brows, tilted eyes of a striking clear green, and thick hair cut short and tinted fair.

‘I see you writing in court,’ she said in a friendly tone. ‘Are you journalist?’

I blushed. The blunt truth would have been, ‘Right now, in spite of my notebook, I’m still only perving.’ But I said, ‘Sort of. I’m a freelance writer.’

She nodded, zipped up her capacious bag and stepped past me to the door. She moved carefully, as if some part of her body hurt her. In repose her face held the shape of courtesy, but her brow was frozen, her expression severe: she radiated such iron fatigue and reined-in sorrow that when she stopped smiling, the world around her darkened. Something inside me, something I had forgotten was there, gave a lurch. I did not want her to get away. I leaned after her and touched her sleeve.

‘Excuse me, Mrs Cinque. If I wanted to write something about this trial, would you be prepared to speak to me?’

She turned and examined me with dry attention, up and down. ‘Yes.’

I told her my name.

‘Maria Cinque,’ she said, with a slow, formal nod. Then, limping slightly, she hurried back into the court and took up her position beside her husband in the front row of the gallery.

When the police searched Madhavi Rao’s house, the day after Joe Cinque died, they found in her bedroom rubbish bin a torn-up diary. The detectives took it away and glued it back together. It was a journal that Anu Singh had kept during her last two years of high school. How it had got into Rao’s wastepaper basket, or when it had been torn to pieces and by whom, did not concern Mr Pappas. He asked Dr Byrne to tell the court what its contents showed about the sort of teenager Anu Singh had been.

The diary was passed hand to hand along the bar table: a bundle of pasted-together pages in a clear plastic bag. I was aware of holding my breath. The pathos of one’s girlish fancies and romances, the idea that they might one day be laid out before strangers in open court – it was enough to make a woman faint with shame. I glanced at Anu Singh. She sat quite still on her chair, one leg folded over the other, her hands clasped in her lap, her hair bound thickly and firmly on her neck.

Four words, said Dr Byrne, summed up the preoccupations of the girl who had kept this diary: Will boys like me? If a boy did like her, she was an attractive person. Nothing much else seemed to supply her with that reassurance, and to get it she was prepared to engage in a very risky degree of sexual activity. He listed the developmental stages that a girl in years eleven and twelve should pass through, and the qualities we would expect to see in her. Evidence for any of these qualities, he said, was completely absent from Anu Singh’s diary.

What was in it, then? Surely, I thought, remembering with a shudder the reams of self-obsessed ravings that had flamed in the backyard bonfires of my life, a diary is the one place where a girl can indulge her unacceptable narcissism with impunity?

But the diary showed, said Byrne, that he had been right about Singh’s serious and very long-standing depression. On the day she killed Joe Cinque she was mentally ill, even psychotic. Yes, a borderline personality disorder was an ‘abnormality of mind’. Her plan was ‘a homicide/suicide arrangement –’

Mrs Cinque in the gallery let out a sceptical grunt.

Dr Byrne did not pause in his flow. On a continuum that ranged from clear and rational at one end to completely psychotic and insane at the other, he said, Anu Singh was well down towards the dark end. She would also have been highly suggestible. Her friends and associates, he said, had either implicitly encouraged her along the fatal pathway, or failed to restrain her from it.

Her reasoning in the moments before Joe Cinque’s death was ‘bizarre’ and ‘grossly impaired’. Before she rang the ambulance, she had made a hysterical phone call to the young woman who had helped her get the Rohypnol. One minute Singh was screaming to her to come and help; the next she was shouting, ‘It’s too late! There’s black stuff coming out of his nose!’

Mrs Cinque flinched. Her upper body bowed forward over her folded arms. Her husband sat staring straight ahead.

On Thursday the court was adjourned till the following Monday. At dusk my flight was called. I stepped out of the terminal for the short walk across the tarmac, and took a gasp of fresh, cool air. Several big, grey-blue arrowheads of cloud lay parallel with the low hills, in whose gathering darkness points of light winked. Later, remembering the beauty of those clouds, I would pick up the significance of ‘arrowheads’. But as I took the few steps between building and plane, grateful after a day spent indoors to be inhaling the perfume of dry grass, I suddenly understood that Anu Singh would be incarcerated. Her life was ruined. Her youth was lost. For whatever reason, she had thrown it all away.

Back in Sydney, my hilltop flat was just a set of rooms. What little homeliness I had managed to imbue it with before I left for Canberra had already leaked away. I could not get interested in my new couch. The famous view across the valley to Bondi bored me. I found I missed the trial: the daily intensity of the drama as it unfolded, the rituals of leaping to one’s feet and bowing, the silent companionship of the other watchers, the long tracts of intent listening. I could hardly wait for Monday.

I got to the court early, straight from the plane, so I could watch the lawyers.

As the power dynamic between students reveals itself in a classroom before the teacher strides in, so does the pecking order at a bar table. Everything social at this table seemed to revolve around Anu Singh’s counsel, Jack Pappas. He was a tough little package of a man with an almost shaven head, a hooked nose, the rosy cheeks of good circulation, and the thick neck of a boxer. You could have drawn a diagram of the lines of attention that centred on him. His voice was the sharpest and most carrying, his enunciation the crispest, his pacing the most leisurely, his gestures the most dramatic. The jokes were his, and others laughed.

A quieter figure was the young man in a dark suit who often took the seat beside Mrs Cinque, or hovered briefly over her with his hand on her shoulder. Thank God they had another son. He looked an appealing person, even at a distance: thick dark hair well cut, a tanned face, a body free in its movements of affection and concern. The couple would turn their stiff faces up to him, and nod, or smile. His presence seemed to lighten something in them. In the complex field of the courtroom’s dynamic, he was a site of benevolence and warmth.

When the lawyers were settled at their table, before the judge entered, Anu Singh materialised in her ankle-length skirt and high sandals. She had a springy, tight-bottomed, almost bouncing walk, and she came in fast and silently. The young security guard who was her escort that day sat down beside her, propped his elbows on his knees and turned to chat with her. She sat in her customary neat posture, but with lowered head. The guard had the look of a country boy. He tilted his face, smiling and grinning at her in a flirting manner. He bent his head and shoulders right down to his knees and peeped up at her sideways, as if to get under her resolute ignoring of him. In any other circumstance you would have said he was coming on to her. She remained quite still, with her back to us and her head bowed. Her father, several rows back in the gallery, watched them with a heavy face.

The prosecutor, Terry Golding, took on Dr Byrne about the meaning of Anu Singh’s journal. ‘There’s no research text,’ said Dr Byrne, ‘to guide us in reading a diary.’ Maybe not, but any woman there could have made a pretty fair stab at it.

Golding read out quotes and the two men duelled over them. Isn’t this rational? Isn’t this normal? It certainly is not! If my daughter had written that I’d be very concerned! They clashed over the teenaged Singh’s account of how she suddenly lost interest in one boy she had been sleeping with, dumped him, and went off with another. The discarded one, she wrote, was really cool about it. He said that he expected it to happen. I am really glad that we can still be friends.

‘Doesn’t that show,’ said Golding, ‘the capacity for developing some intimacy in the relationship with the first boy?’

‘No!’ said Byrne. ‘She’s a self-centred, angry girl who’s punishing this boy quite unnecessarily. She sees boys as an expendable commodity. You get one, you use him up, you throw him away.’

Memories from my own selfish and carelessly hurtful youth flashed through my head, scenes I did not care to examine. I shifted in my seat. I had joked with the journalists about it, but this stuff was getting too close for comfort.

Dr Byrne was asked to comment on a mysterious list of names that had been found in Anu Singh’s locker at the remand centre. He examined it carefully, then raised his eyes and said, ‘She had developed fantasies of revenge against the people on this list. Like a grandiose child, she was resentful that people did not conform to her wishes. I have no way of knowing if they were fantasies or real plans.’

The judge ordered the suppression of the names on the list. Dismissed, the psychologist packed his papers into his bag and zipped it up with a tearing sound.

The two journalists took me across the road to a restaurant called Tosolini’s. We sat outside under plane trees still in leaf. Huge buses kept roaring round the corner in low gear. To hear each other we had to lean right in over our plates.

The young women were even more in sympathy than I with Mr Golding’s argument that Singh’s teenage diary contained ‘normal’ thoughts and attitudes, even behaviours. We confessed with blushes to our own ghastly adolescent diaries, at least as bad as Anu Singh’s, which we had all destroyed on leaving home. None of us could even begin to imagine why Singh had carried hers with her into adult life.

‘And whose were the names that the judge suppressed, on that list?’ I asked.

‘They were on the back of a letter,’ said one of them with a shrug.

The women looked at me with raised eyebrows, then picked up their forks and attacked their salads.

On Tuesday morning Anu Singh came in wearing a dark blue tailored jacket in a soft synthetic fabric, fitted to the curve of her waist – that womanly roundness she had fought so hard to eradicate from her body. Her hair was still hanging down her back, and while we all waited for the judge, she put it up. Although her back was turned to us, it was an almost indecently intimate and histrionic display, a series of age-old, deeply feminine gestures. First, the raising of both arms and the gathering of the hair in two hands. Then the twisting and rolling and flicking and doubling back of its dark mass, redder towards the tips, into a thick club; the binding of it with a broad black stretchy band; then the patting, the sensitive roaming of the flattened palms against the smooth round curve of her head; the feeling for loose strands at the temples and the anchoring of them over and behind the ears. All was in order. Satisfied, the small flexible hands flew up, out, and down to her lap, where they would lie, hour after hour, neatly clasped and occasionally twisting, while her inner life (or lack of it), her disturbances, her madnesses and cruelties were stripped bare and paraded before a small, intent cluster of strangers.

Her father, in the back row of the public gallery, watched without expression the dance of hands and hair. His chin was sunk over his knotted tie.

The second expert called by Anu Singh’s defence was an Englishman with soft, tousled white hair, a slight shoulder-stoop and a gently self-deprecating expression: Paul Mullen, Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at Monash University and Clinical Director of the Victorian Institute of Mental Health.

When Mr Pappas, running him through his credentials, asked him if he was indeed born on 28 September 1944, he replied in a mild, jesting tone that would not have been out of place at a cocktail party, ‘So my mother gives me to understand.’ Nobody laughed. His vague, sweet smile did not falter: it would turn out to be his characteristic expression, as much a part of his persona as the humourless didactic mode was of Dr Byrne’s. But in an airy assertion of independence which went unchallenged, he chose not to take the chair on the witness stand, and gave evidence on his feet. Later, when declining Mr Golding’s invitation to be seated for cross-examination, he explained with his charming smile that he had been trained in the customs of British courts, ‘where only the elderly, the frail and the totally disabled sit’. He reminded me of a certain minor character in a D. H. Lawrence novel: the upper-middle-class educated man who disconcerts the unsophisticated farmers with his ‘courtly, naïve manner, so suave, so merry, so innocent’.

Like Dr Byrne, Professor Mullen had visited Anu Singh at Belconnen Remand Centre. He had interviewed her for over five hours. He was confident in declaring that she had been suffering from a ‘significant depressive illness’ throughout 1997. Indeed, it was necessary to postulate a depressive illness in order to explain her actions on the day of ‘the tragic killing of Mr Cinque’.

At Mullen’s use of the word ‘tragic’, the tone of the proceedings subtly altered. He was about to haul them up out of pathology and into the realms of archetypal drama. The clunky American jargon of testing and measurement was not his style. He spoke with a relaxed eloquence, in flowing sentences of interesting syntax and vocabulary.

He talked about the brief periods of elation, even of positive happiness, that witnesses had noticed in Anu Singh shortly before she committed the crime. To explain these he introduced the concept of masked depression. She had certainly not had manic depression, the most severe sort; but she did have affective instability – and some of the best descriptions of this, said Mullen with his amiable smile, are to be found not in psychological texts but in literature – books written by people of high intelligence and creative ability who have also suffered from depression – Virginia Woolf, for example, in her novel Mrs Dalloway.

Professor Mullen struck me as so plausible that I was surprised when his written report was fiercely challenged by the Crown. In a fury of correction Mr Golding now filleted the document of unsubstantiated material straight from the mouth of Anu Singh – specially things she had told Mullen about the character of the man she had killed. ‘Would you go then to the paragraph Relationship with Mr Cinque? Would you delete fairly straight? And materialistic but protective? Would you delete when inflamed by jealousy down to with another man?’ So ruthless was Golding’s attack that the professor made a comical protest. ‘You want me to strike that out too?’ he said with a rueful laugh. ‘All my best lines are going!’

At lunchtime, to clear my head, I went for a walk in the autumn sunshine across Garema Place, the broad pedestrian precinct in the centre of Canberra. Men and women who work in government departments stride across this square with identity cards swinging on long chains round their necks. Junkies slouch whining in phone booths. Magpies perch, warbling their absent-minded melodies, on the chair-backs of outdoor cafes. As I walked I brooded crankily on the business of the defence psychiatrists. How can an expert witness hired by the family of the accused possibly be considered disinterested? This couldn’t be right. I must have misunderstood. Why didn’t the court itself appoint and pay the experts? Or was this a dumb question?

As I returned across the thick, dark-green grass to the Supreme Court, I saw Mr and Mrs Cinque seated quietly together on a bench under a leafy tree. They seemed composed and civilised, sitting outdoors to take the air and to eat slowly a picnic lunch they had brought with them, while everyone else rushed into the cafeteria and bolted down bags of take-away, or blew ridiculous sums in restaurants.

Anu Singh entered the court, shoulders high and cramped, her club of hair half-loosed from its moorings. She got into position on her seat and, with obsessive niceness, arranged her long skirt over her crossed leg and ankle. She had a remarkable ability to sit still in one unchanging position, hour after hour, occasionally flexing and relaxing her shoulder muscles. The padded, steel-framed chairs that she and her escort occupied stood on a section of floor where several metal loops were recessed into the carpet. I couldn’t help thinking, with a slightly sick feeling, of the trapdoor of a gallows. In another country or a different era, she would have been hanged for this.

Who would want to cross-examine Professor Mullen? In the face of his highly evolved manner, his light, nonchalant laugh and his nimble footwork, it was the most unenviable job imaginable. Mr Golding battered away at him about rational. Wasn’t it rational that Anu Singh had delayed calling the ambulance because she didn’t want Joe Cinque to find out she had injected him with heroin?

‘To the extent that she was utterly terrified of this man,’ said Mullen, ‘it doesn’t seem rational – no.’

Utterly terrified? Where was that coming from? He slid the phrase in so silkily that it made hardly a ripple.

‘I watched him die and I didn’t save him,’ quoted Golding. ‘Why is that a psychiatric illness? Wasn’t she just a very selfish young woman?’

The professor turned on the prosecutor a gaze of shocked reproach. ‘Your notions of selfishness,’ he said, ‘extend way beyond mine. This isn’t a selfish act. It’s an extraordinary act. To try and reduce it to the mundane notion of selfishness does such harm to the awfulness of these events.’

‘And the fact that after all her elaborate planning she didn’t kill herself? Does that suggest she wasn’t all that depressed?’

‘I’ll tell you what she said,’ said Mullen. ‘It made sense to me. She said, “Up to that time it was like executing some power plan. Seeing him lying there gasping for breath brought me back for a moment to reality.” ’

Mrs Cinque lurched forward and clutched her arms to her belly, as if she had been stabbed. The young man in the dark jacket put his arm round her shoulders. She went pale, a bad yellow colour. She unfolded a tissue and held it to her mouth. She struggled to compose herself. I wanted to cry out with horror, and pity.

When the court rose at the end of the day, Anu Singh turned to Professor Mullen as she passed him with her guard, and flashed him a bright smile. She gave him a little wave. She mouthed to him, ‘Thank you!’ The ordinariness of her demeanour knocked the breath out of me.

Why wasn’t she down on her knees, grovelling for forgiveness? From the Cinques? From the whole human race? Begging for pardon, and with no sense that she was entitled to it, no expectation of ever receiving it?

Mullen had fought hard for her. He had gone to the wire. ‘Utterly terrified’, this phrase he had plucked from the ether and tossed down so casually before the judge, could only have been an artful way of hinting at what Golding had forced him to excise from his report. On a dumb gut level I did not believe Anu Singh had been ‘utterly terrified’ of Joe Cinque. It was unthinkable that the cause of ‘utter terror’, if it had existed, wouldn’t have emerged much earlier in the story, and been heavily leaned on by her defence.

On my way across Garema Place I noticed an internet shop. I sat down at a computer, went to google.com, and keyed in the name of Professor Mullen. The entries scrolled down and down and down forever.

I stumped back along the broad eucalypt avenues to the hotel. My room had an ugly floral bedspread and purple net curtains. I couldn’t sit still. I went downstairs to the bar and drank some whisky. I tried to examine rationally my response to Byrne and Mullen. Were they really as glib as they seemed? Psychiatry is very hard to gainsay, I thought. If you aren’t satisfied by a category from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which claims to explain a person’s dreadful actions, you are thrown back on simple, quotidian concepts of moral disapproval such as Mr Golding’s selfish, that shallow, old-fashioned, tinny little word that rang so cheap and caused the cultivated professor to throw up his hands. At the other end of the scale you may wind up having to endorse terms like wicked or evil – words that people these days (unless they are discussing Islamic terrorists) find repugnant, because they sound religious, or primitive, or naïve – or, more convincingly, because they mark the point at which we are overcome by fear and revulsion – the point where we stop thinking and start shouting. But does psychological sophistication over-ride a sense that some actions are just plain bad? How much of human behaviour, in the end, can one understand?

Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. When I came upon this maxim, as a young student of literature in the ’60s, I extravagantly admired it and took it as a guide. Only a few years later, though, I read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and found that his character Aschenbach scorns what he calls the ‘flabby humanitarianism’ of the saying. I hated seeing my treasure of wisdom scorched by his off-hand contempt.

Now, though, I wondered if one ought to be wary of allowing oneself to ‘understand’ so readily – to skate all the way through to forgiveness. Doesn’t a killer have to carry any responsibility for her actions? Doesn’t she have to make some sort of reparation? Because when all is said and done, one brutal fact remains.

Joe Cinque is dead.

On Wednesday I learnt something that amazed me: the two Crown psychiatrists had not been permitted to interview Anu Singh. They had to base their reports on documents: the results of the MMPI and a Rorschach test, Singh’s medical reports, the police statements of various witnesses, and some of the letters Singh had written from custody.

‘How can this be?’ I asked the journalists. ‘When her whole defence rests on psychiatric assessment?’

It was her legal right to remain silent, they said. Once you chose not to give evidence – and Singh had made this choice at the start – you didn’t have to say anything to anybody. Pappas, they told me, had even tried to argue that the Crown shouldn’t be allowed to call psychiatric evidence in reply to Byrne and Mullen. Crispin had ruled against him on this. But the defence had offered the Crown shrinks access to Singh only if they first agreed to support the defence of diminished responsibility. This floored me. It seemed so madly unjust, so meaningless and perfunctory, that I didn’t even know how to phrase a question about it, or to whom I should direct it.

First the Crown called Dr Susan Hayes, Associate Professor of Behavioural Sciences from the University of Sydney. Hayes was a small, motherly-looking woman of fifty or so in a cream jacket and shiny earrings. Her manner was modest and her voice so quiet that one had to strain to hear it, in the muffling acoustic of the carpeted courtroom.

She came at the matter from a fresh angle: the eating disorder. The sort of depression that comes over a woman when she can’t achieve the body image she desires, she said, is different from clinical depression. At such times a woman can experience an ultimate dislike of the body that can tip over into ideas of suicide.

Dislike of the body. I imagined every woman in the court thinking, with an ironic twist of the mouth, Tell me about it! Suddenly, after all the lofty conceits bandied about by Byrne and Mullen, this was starting to feel real. Maybe only another woman could intuitively grasp the extent to which Singh, like the rest of us, was ruled by her body, imprisoned in it and condemned to struggle against it. But, oddly, this insight did not melt the hearts of the women who sat listening in court. On the contrary, the more like an ordinary woman Singh came to appear, the less sympathy she had to draw on, and the more the psychiatrists’ explanations of her behaviour sounded like excuses which would not stand up in the harshly sceptical forum where women face the judgement of their sisters.

Hayes took a tremendous pounding from Mr Pappas for her view that many of Singh’s fancied complaints – rotting flesh, ants crawling under her skin, a different head on her body – might be interpreted not as signs of psychosis but as side-effects of the recreational drugs she was taking.

He roared, he sneered.

Her voice trembled with anger, it sank at times to a thread. She dug her heels in. She became quietly mulish.

He had to push her every inch of the way to the desperate phone call Singh made to Bronwyn Cammack while Joe Cinque lay dying. Didn’t this show, Dr Hayes, that her thinking was grossly disordered?

‘There was conflict in her mind,’ said Hayes stubbornly. ‘She was in two minds about calling the ambulance. She wanted to appear to be saving him, but not to actually save him.’

The court rose. I chanced to bump elbows with Dr Hayes in the crowded lobby. I must have flashed her a sympathetic look, for she grinned at me and pulled a self-mocking face. ‘It’s so frustrating!’ she muttered. ‘They want you to make absolute statements! I can’t! I work in probabilities. And when it comes to intent! Most of the people I see say that forming a conscious intent was the furthest thing from their minds.’

She hurried away. My two young journalists emerged from their neighbouring courtrooms.

‘There’s a couple of junkies in there,’ said the fair-haired one, putting her notebook away, ‘about to be sentenced. Their five-week-old baby had every bone in its body broken. The mother’s still hitting up. She was nodding off in court. But she’s still got custody. And she’s pregnant again.’

‘How’s your thing going?’ asked the dark one, jerking her thumb at Justice Crispin’s court.

‘Still the shrinks,’ I said.

She breathed out hard through her nose. ‘Anu Singh puts on acts!’ she said. ‘Let me up there! I’ll tell them she puts on acts for Daddy!’

They trudged off to file their copy from the so-called Media Room, a narrow windowless cupboard full of computers and phones.

I walked into the toilets and found Mrs Cinque there again, at the mirrors, skilfully outlining her lips with pencil. We greeted each other. She seemed open to conversation. I asked for her phone number and she gave it to me. She watched me copy it into my notebook, and said tentatively, ‘In couple months I got to go overseas. I had a very bad operation on my foot, I have to get it fix. But after that, in a few months . . .’

Again the formal nod, the sustained eye contact, the sombre smile. She snapped shut her large leather bag and went out the door with her slow, stiffened gait.

When the court rose that day, while I was still crouched on my chair scribbling notes, Dr Singh stepped down from the gallery and into the well of the court where his daughter was speaking with her lawyers. Seeing him approach, she turned slightly towards him, smiled, and said, ‘Okay, Dad.’ At the same time she made a spontaneous fence in front of her waist, with her two hands bent sharply back at the wrist and her palms towards him: Back off. As both a daughter and a parent I felt the stinging whack of that gesture.

I caught up with Dr Singh on the shallow stairs, just inside the big doors. I introduced myself as ‘a writer’ who ‘might want to write something about this trial’. I offered my hand and he took it: his was very dense, warm and dry. I told him who I wrote for and his face brightened. ‘Come outside,’ he said.

Out there in the lobby I was awkwardly aware of the Cinque family, three metres away at the water cooler. I hoped Mrs Cinque wouldn’t change her mind about me if she saw me speaking to Dr Singh. He was a big, blustery man and he spoke with energy and eagerness, leaning down to me: a great rush of words surged out of him. I could see his thick dark lashes, the glistening pale skin at the corners of his eyes: was it moistening with tears?

‘We want people to know about this story!’ he said. ‘We want it to be a warning! You see that poor girl over there –’ (it took me a couple of beats to realise he meant Mrs Cinque) ‘– sometimes she’s angry. I don’t blame her. I’m not angry. I know my daughter will go to gaol. When we heard Joe was dead we were devastated. He would come to our house! She was going to marry him! We will give you an interview. As long as you like. We will all speak to you.’ He patted his pockets for a card. ‘It would have to be in Sydney.’

‘I live in Sydney. Give me your card tomorrow.’

But he did not want to let me go. He began vehemently to criticise Dr Hayes. ‘She was trying to please the prosecutor! She does not concede that eating disorder and depression are linked! This has been scientifically proved but she does not concede it! She’s a psychologist. We don’t think much of psychologists. We prefer psychiatrists. You must hear both sides! If you only hear the injured party’s side – this mother here – she is angry because her boy is dead. But our daughter –’

He got himself under control, and stepped back with a tense smile and a nod.

I picked up my bag and headed for the street. Hearing a woman’s voice as I passed the water cooler where Mr and Mrs Cinque were standing, I glanced back and saw the good-looking young fellow, with well-cut dark hair and a wedding ring, lean back from their tight group in a burst of laughter. What a strong family they must be.

The April evening was warm. Drifting through Civic, I climbed a flight of stairs to a Japanese restaurant, took a table and ordered something clean and delicate to eat. While I waited, tired out from a day of writing at speed, of trying to follow the battling arguments, my thoughts slid vaguely to Anu Singh, this young woman whose horrible deed had seized my imagination in such a troubling way. What was she doing now? Out at Belconnen Remand Centre. With slop for food. Under harsh fluorescent strips.

And Joe Cinque is dead.

The next morning I was standing in the sun outside the court building when the dark young man who often sat next to Mrs Cinque rocked up to me with his hand out. ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘We haven’t met, but I’ve heard you’re taking an interest. My name’s Harry Hains.’

‘Oh! I thought you were the Cinques’ other son!’

He laughed. ‘No! I’m the police officer in the case.’

Close up I could see the Australian Federal Police logo on the tip of his tie, but it took me a moment to shift my preconceptions. ‘I saw you being so nice to Mrs Cinque – I thought –’

He shrugged. ‘They’ve had a very hard time. I’ve got quite a close relationship with them. Been up and down to Newcastle.’ He was smoking, but politely, holding the cigarette down low behind him, out of sight. He looked young, maybe in his late thirties, and his face was smiling and mobile, with warm brown eyes and a lively expression. I didn’t know there were detectives like this: I lived near Kings Cross, where they had a different reputation.

‘There’s definitely something wrong with the girl,’ he went on, ‘but there’s something wrong with all of us. None of us have got a perfect personality. None of us would say we’d never hated anyone. But . . .’

He took a furtive drag on his cigarette. When he breathed out, the skin around his eyes contracted into fine wrinkles.

‘What about the other woman,’ I said, ‘Madhavi Rao? How does she fit into the story?’

He looked around. People were stirring themselves and walking into the building. ‘Wait for her trial,’ he said, dashing out his smoke. ‘You’ll see.’

That morning the last of the four psychiatric expert witnesses was called to the stand. When I had first spotted this tough-looking man, with his designer stubble and short greying hair, louring against a wall outside the courtroom, I had idly cast him as Greek or Lebanese, and probably a detective, he was so dark and hulking and self-contained, so perfectly at ease in the outer chamber of a criminal court. But his name turned out to be Dr Michael Diamond, and the minute he opened his mouth, his nipped-off consonants and fastidious vowels placed him as a South African. He was a graduate in medicine from the University of Cape Town who practised as a psychiatrist in North Sydney. He settled his considerable bulk into the chair, dropped his chin on to his chest, and studied his interlocutor from under his brow.

Diamond shifted seamlessly between technical vocabulary and ordinary moral language. It was startling to hear him throw round terms like ‘immature and dramatic display’ or ‘superficial, glib attention-seeking’. He didn’t accept that Anu Singh thought she was dying. He didn’t agree with Professor Mullen’s emphasis on ‘masked depression’. And he was not convinced that when she killed Joe Cinque she was suffering from a significant abnormality of mind.

He was more interested in her borderline personality disorder, her eating disorder, and her body image disturbance. She could think all right, he said, and she could reason. Where her real impairment lay was in the process of maturing. She couldn’t handle complex emotions. She couldn’t withstand a less than perfect body image. She couldn’t resolve conflict in her life in a mature way. She couldn’t maintain composure, or control her moods.

And he took a very tough view of the frantic phone call to Bronwyn Cammack when Joe Cinque lay dying. He quoted Singh’s response to Cammack’s enraged command: ‘I can’t call the paramedics. I gave him the drugs. He doesn’t know. He’ll be furious.’ The reasoning behind this was not disordered, he said. It was focused and purposeful. Her fantasy was that she could be rescued. She was trying to get her friend to reverse what she had done, so as to keep it away from the authorities. It was clear and callous reasoning, he said, at an intensely distressing time.

Of all the four expert witnesses, Diamond was the one whose demeanour was least affected by the change in tone between examination and cross-examination. Nothing piqued or rattled him. There was something immovable, almost sphinx-like about him in the witness chair, a massive, stable repose. He sat there unperturbed while Pappas strafed him from left and right.

‘Is borderline personality,’ said Pappas, ‘an abnormality of mind?’

‘I don’t accept that,’ said Diamond. ‘It’s a disorder of psychological development that occurs very early in life. There are people with borderline personality disorder who have no problem with their mind. But they can exhibit abnormality of mind, particularly when they’re threatened with abandonment. They lack a secure and developed sense of self to rely on in times of difficulty. They feel susceptible to annihilation – that they might fail to exist.’

‘Borderline personality disorder,’ said Pappas, ‘is not a transient condition, I take it?’

‘Personality per se,’ said Diamond bluntly, ‘is not transient. We are who we are.’

Diamond tackled the conundrum at the heart of the story: the fact that Singh had talked so obsessively about killing herself and yet had ended up killing someone else. The whole scheme, he said, with its support roles and large cast of extras, had been a tremendous drama she was staging – part of her narcissistic need to be taken seriously and helped. She derived so much gratification from being at the centre of this drama that the point was not to commit suicide.

‘The purpose is not death,’ said Diamond. ‘Death here is almost ignored. The purpose is to keep the drama going for as long as possible. Look at the business of arranging the dinner party – assembling the gathering, putting energy into it. But when the support and feedback is suddenly no longer available – and when the moment comes for her to inject herself – the whole thing evaporates.’

Steady and calm, sunk in his chair with his hands clasped easily in his lap, Diamond argued Pappas back against the wall about the depressive illness that the defence psychiatrists had diagnosed in Anu Singh. ‘Depression,’ he said, ‘is fairly responsive to medication. According to her medical records, she took four months of Prozac with no response. She was a narcissistic person in terrible distress –’

Mrs Cinque cut across him in a low, bitter voice: ‘Bullshit.’

‘– who tenaciously sought help, but never pursued it or undertook any form of treatment. What she did was, she consulted. She had her beliefs challenged and she moved on. This is not the way people with profound depression respond. The subjective experience of depression is unbearable. It’s very difficult not to reach out for help.’

Justice Crispin leaned down from the bench and addressed Dr Diamond. ‘I just wonder, though, Doctor,’ he said, in an oddly dogged tone. ‘What if somebody who really believes they’re dying goes to a doctor. What if the doctor says to them, “I can’t find out what’s killing you, but hey – I’ll refer you to a psychiatrist who’ll make you feel happier while you die”? Would the patient really say, “Okay – I’ll have some psychiatric treatment so I’ll be cheerier as I cark it”?’

A thought flashed across my mind. I forgot it at once, but years later there it was, scribbled in the margin of my notes. He’s going to send her home.

The following morning the two barristers summed up. Perhaps it was the absence of a jury to impress with grand, passionate rhetoric that made the final speeches so pedestrian and anti-climactic. The story dwindled to a halt. Justice Crispin promised a judgement ‘sometime next week’, and adjourned.

I stayed in my seat and watched Anu Singh, with her hair well bound and wearing a long, fluttery skirt, thank Mr Pappas and his solicitor. She shook hands with them, using the two-handed grip that denotes ardent sincerity. She smiled at each man and managed to speak to him a few intense words before her guard led her away. Again I noticed her odd, erect, slightly bouncing walk as she was ushered rapidly up the stairs and out through the double doors into the lobby. Much later, watching the animated movie Toy Story with my grand-daughter, I would be reminded of Singh’s gait by that of Buzz Lightyear at the moment when he sees on TV a commercial for himself, and realises that he is not a unique and invincible intergalactic superhero but merely a mass-produced plastic doll labelled MADE IN TAIWAN. It was the walk of someone desperately trying, against a total collapse of self-image, to maintain bella figura.

I turned to leave the court and saw that the quieter of the two journalists, the fair-haired one, had been sitting behind me, also watching. We looked at each other, but did not speak. We were the last to go.

The driver of my cab to the airport told me that he had spent six and a half years in the police force. He had left because he ‘wanted to become a human being again’.

‘What made you feel you’d stopped being human?’

‘Ooooh,’ he said, thinking as he drove, ‘if I saw a dead body it’d be . . . well, not exactly a joke, but . . .’

‘Do you mean you’d become hard?’

‘Not hard. More . . . that I’d seen everything. Nothing could surprise me any more. There was no joy left in life. And as soon as I realised that, I said to myself, Right. Time to get out. And I went back into hospitality. Motels – relief managing, for a chain. The wife and I went all over Australia. Never stayed anywhere for more than eight days. We had two suitcases, that was all. We loved it. One day we’d be in Dubbo, the next in Armidale. It was great.’

He told me he was forty-two, but he looked much younger: a tough, handsome bloke, who laughed and smiled a lot, as if he enjoyed being alive.

What would become of D-C Harry Hains? How could that warmth and openness last?

At home in Sydney, life lost its forward impetus and became limp and pointless. My mind slackened off again into self-obsession and regret. My family was far away, my friends busily absorbed in their own affairs. The only thing that could drag me out of my own cramped sorrows and shove me into the reality of other people was the story of Joe Cinque’s murder.

As the week between the trial and the judgement dragged along, I became restless. I paced, I ate lollies, I scrubbed every surface in the flat, I washed clothes that weren’t dirty, I got up at four in the morning and heaved furniture from room to room. I wasn’t just worried about getting back to Canberra on time. I was agitated by the prospect of a solemn judgement on the meaning of a woman’s life.

Do we identify with a criminal in that we too secretly long to be judged? Popularly, being ‘judgemental’ is ill thought of and resented. But what if we want our deeds, our natures, our very souls to be summed up and evaluated ? A line to be drawn under our acts to date? A punishment declared, amends made, the slate wiped clean? A born-again Christian, trying to explain his new sense of freedom, once said to me, ‘All my debts are paid.’ Anu Singh, with her ‘promiscuity’, her frantic need to be found attractive by men, her ‘using up’ of men and ‘throwing them away’; her perhaps turbulent relationship with her father; her blaming of a man for everything that was wrong in her life; her crazed desire for revenge on him; her lack of empathy with others, her self-absorption, her narcissism: I was hanging out for judgement to be pronounced on such a woman.

By mid-week I had taken a punt that Justice Crispin was the sort of bloke who liked his desk to be clear by Friday afternoon: I booked a flight and a hotel. On Thursday afternoon the DPP called me and said they were ‘ninety-five per cent sure’ that the judgement would be delivered the next day. I threw skin cream and a toothbrush into a bag and took a cab to the airport.

In Canberra the late April air was bright and dry. I checked into my hotel and walked to Garema Place. Even on a pleasant autumn afternoon the enormous plaza, designed at some more innocent era of the city’s history, was made squalid by the drifts of anxious junkies, distracted by their searching, who congregated round the phone booths at the top of the rise near the bus terminal. At five o’clock the temperature dropped and there was a dark edge to everything. I turned a corner on my way back to the hotel and saw in the west a pure sky with one tiny orange cloud floating in it.

Does a person get any sleep at all, on the night before her acts are to be judged?

The next morning was fine and sunny. I walked along Northbourne Avenue towards the court. I didn’t feel good. There was something wrong with my stomach. I had a general sensation of bodily disturbance. Was it loneliness, as usual, or was I coming down with something? Could I be gearing up for a heart attack? The first person my eye fell on, in the lobby of the Supreme Court, was Dr Singh. At the sight of him I understood what was wrong with me: I was sick with suspense. I greeted him and he spun round to face me.

‘What view will you take?’ he cried, almost babbling with tension. ‘What view? From what view? You must write it from the point of view that it is not a game! People say, “Oh, he’s a doctor. He got the best psychiatrists for her” – but if it was a game, would we have called the Mental Health Crisis Team? Would we? Would you?’

I asked him for his phone number. He rattled it off and rushed away.

Inside, the courtroom was transformed. During the fortnight of the trial proper, observers had been few and far between, but today the public gallery was packed. The greater volume of flesh and clothing and shoe leather produced a different acoustic: the ceiling felt lower, the air denser, harder to breathe.

Anu Singh was brought in. Instead of her customary single guard, she had today an escort of two: a wild-eyed, thuggish-looking fellow on one side, and on the other a woman with straw hair. Anu Singh’s own hair was shinier, less tightly clumped on the nape of her neck. She was dressed in a dark jacket and trousers, and high backless shoes. She looked smaller. She did not cross her legs, but placed her feet neatly side by side, then lowered her head and fidgeted with her fingers.

The tipstaff behind the velvet curtain rapped a warning on the floor. Justice Crispin entered on a tide of seriousness, not with his habitual hasty sweep, but slowly, almost grandly, looking sombre as always, but also paler, and with his head held higher, giving more eye contact: offering his face. He bowed and sat down. Laying his papers on the bench before him, he raised his eyes to the room, and launched into it without prologue or preamble.

‘I find the defendant not guilty of murder,’ he said, ‘but I find the defendant guilty of murder.’

Mrs Cinque uttered a choked cry.

A stunned, thick silence filled the court. What? What did he say? How can she be guilty of murder and yet not guilty of murder?

Mr Pappas leapt to his feet. ‘Your Honour,’ he said. ‘I believe your Honour has made an error. You said “Guilty of murder”, but with respect, your Honour, you meant “Guilty of manslaughter”.’

Three beats. No one breathed. The judge had made a colossal, clanging Freudian slip.

Crispin raised his head. His face was blank with shock. With a lawyer’s reflex he muttered, ‘I withdraw that.’ He pulled the document to him and read out the judgement again, correcting himself emphatically: ‘I find the defendant not guilty of murder, but I find the defendant guilty of manslaughter.’

The dead man’s mother burst into wild sobs. D-C Hains, who was sitting right behind her, laid his flat palm against her back and held it there.

Justice Crispin set the date for the sentencing hearing: 21 June. More psychiatric evidence, he said, would be presented on that day.

Mrs Cinque covered her face and wept aloud.

‘The judgement,’ said Justice Crispin, ‘is fifty pages long. You’ll need time to read it.’

He got to his feet and so did we. He bowed; we bowed. He strode out.

Mr Pappas turned from the bar table to where Anu Singh was sitting between her guards. This time there were no handshakes. A cluster of men in dark suits and black robes closed round the young woman. I glanced down to scribble in my notebook. When I looked up, Anu Singh’s metal-framed chair and those of her escorts were being brusquely moved aside. Two uniformed sheriffs bent over the piece of floor on which the chairs had previously stood, where the little handles were recessed into the carpet. The two men inserted their forefingers into the metal loops, gripped them, and lifted. I saw what they were for: a whole section of the floor reared up on hinges, revealing, at an acute angle, the bare timber planks of a staircase. The two guards guided Anu Singh towards the trapdoor. She stepped into the hole. Down she went, with her head bowed. The last thing to disappear was her hair, bound in its thick club.

Mrs Cinque stood in the front row of the public gallery, barely an arm’s reach from the hole in the floor. In a hoarse, wild voice she cried out; she cursed the descending girl. ‘This is where you belong. You stay. For ever. Rot in hell, you bitch. Devil.’ The girl was already too deep to be seen. The floor closed over her and became once more a rectangle of carpet.

People pressed into the aisles and up the shallow stairs to the doors. A sheriff was handing out copies of the judgement. I grabbed one and pushed out into the lobby. The crowd was moving sluggishly away and out towards the open air. I staggered to a chair against the wall. The Singhs – father, mother and a teenage brother I had not seen before – moved past me slow and swimmingly, like figures in a dream. The boy looked devastated and puffy-eyed. The mother, shell-shocked, somehow maintained her dignity, eyes down, dark-faced, inward. Dr Singh caught my eye and made a formal nod to me, almost a bow.

One of the young reporters hurried past me: ‘I’m gonna go file.’

Out on the broad front steps of the Supreme Court, in blinding dry sun and chill air, the TV and radio journalists swarmed in a tight gang: the older cameramen in jeans and boots, silently lugging the heavy gear on their shoulders; the jabbering young journos in their power suits and gelled hair and make-up, yelling to each other, tossing their harsh jests back and forth.

‘So!’ said a sleek girl of twenty, with a shrill, cynical laugh. ‘He bought her story!’

‘Manslaughter still gets twenty years, though,’ murmured a less glamorous young woman, pressing her notebook to her chest. ‘She could be in for quite a while.’

Twenty years! Stunned, I got the sum wrong: I thought, She’ll be my age by the time she gets out. Filled with an obscure shame, I slunk around behind the jostling mob and lurked on the lower steps, pretending to be only a passer-by. I tried to stay near the camera crews; I was comforted by their closed mouths, their stoical detachment. A sheriff came out through the revolving glass door and announced that the Cinques had been taken out of the building by a back door. There was no one to wait for now but the Singh family. I couldn’t take any more of this. I turned away, gripping Justice Crispin’s judgement under my arm, and jogged across the plaza to a line of saplings in large pots. With my back to the court I crouched against the cold concrete rim of a planter box and howled into my hanky. I didn’t even know who I was crying for.

By the time I had pulled myself together and crept out from behind the potted hedge, the journalists had dispersed. I climbed the deserted steps and cut through the Supreme Court lobby. Already the entry to ‘our’ courtroom was teeming with a fresh cast of characters: the same weird horse-hair wigs and scholarly gowns, but inside them different barristers, ready to prosecute and defend different people, to conjure up a whole new variation on the eternal themes.

How soon even a frightful event like Joe Cinque’s murder is swept away into the past! Something in me rose up, indignant for him. What – not even a decent, respectful pause? No breathing space? On, on rushes time, without hesitation, without mercy.

And yet the matter still hung unresolved: two months must pass before his killer would be sentenced, and the trial of Madhavi Rao, the second accused, was not even slated.